On the surface, 100 miles in 60 hours might seem reasonable.

The Barkley Marathons is unlike any other ultramarathon in the world. Over the next 60 hours, runners will attempt to complete five laps on a 20-mile course through the mountainous, forested park. With a quiet flick, he lights the cigarette and lets out a stream of smoke: the signal that the race has begun. Cantrell stands on the other side of the gate with a fresh Camel in hand. Though you might know him by a different name: Lazarus Lake.Įvery year on the closest Saturday to April Fools’ Day, about 40 hand-picked runners line up behind the yellow metal gate that marks the entrance to northern Tennessee’s Frozen Head State Park. He is the mastermind behind arguably the world’s toughest footrace: the Barkley Marathons. I’m an old, beat-up man who doesn’t have a lot left in the tank.” He cut a pea-shaped piece of moleskin and pressed it into the ball of his foot.īut Cantrell is not just any old man. “It’s a mystery to me why you want to write about my transcon,” he said. The previous night, I had driven up from my home in New Mexico to meet him at a Super 8 motel, where I found him seated next to a half-empty box of pizza, applying benzoin and bandages to his feet. Cantrell was averaging 27 miles a day and would take four months to finish.

Many people who cross the country on foot run 40 to 50 miles a day and finish in two or three months. This patch of sandhills and hay bales just east of Valentine marked the roughly 1,800-mile point in a transcontinental journey that Cantrell had begun two months earlier in Newport, Rhode Island. “I take them the way they’re headed,” he said, “or they’ll just turn around and walk back.”

With a painful moan, he bent down and scooped up the animal, then righted himself and shuffled across the road, where he set the turtle in the long grass. Above white crew socks peeked a few inches of tanned calves.

The cattle prod he was using as a walking stick tapped against the asphalt as he made slow, steady headway along the shoulder.īoth pinky toes poked out of holes in Cantrell’s running shoes. “We gotta get there before a car does,” he said, pointing at the small green-yellow shell a dozen yards ahead of us in the westbound lane of Nebraska’s Highway 20. Around 10 A.M., Gary Cantrell saw a turtle in the middle of the road.

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